Thinkin about that one whaler who complained about his shipmates in his journal being like ‘no one on this ship reads educational books, no one reads the bible, everyone only wants pencils so they can draw ships and obscene pictures’ and I’m just like…..where are they….where are the dirty drawings this fellow was complaining about…I wanna see some 19th century whaler’s amateur pornographic scribbles so bad WHERE ARE THEY?
Idk why this particular one has gotten so many notes, but here’s the fellow’s actual words. His name was Jon Langdon, and he signed aboard the bark St. Peter in 1849 at age 21.
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[…] topgallantsails. The weather is very pleasant To day is spent like every other sunday in eating and sleeping angry words and a dial of swearing &c. Interesting and instructive books are seldom found in their hands and the perusal of the sacred pages of the Bible is beneath their notice altogether but the slate and pencil are in great demand for drawing Ships obscene pictures &c &c. Took in fore topgallantsail at 2pm.”
Another fellow from another voyage aboard the whaler Saratoga, William Chappell, also complains about his shipmates’ taste in literature. 1853.
“[it grieves me] to see how wreckless and indifferent my shipmates are to this great subject It is painfull to see how dilligent they are in reading the trashy novel to the neglect of the bible”
What trashy novels are you reading lads I wanna know.
did you say you wanted to see the victorian whalers’ porn? ok
My take is that “forced diversity” in media very much isn’t a real thing but there is a trend of diversity with 0 thought put into how characters’ identities affect them & if it makes any fucking sense what they’re doing in the story. And also everybody forgot what tokenism is
Like that thing where somebody’s trying to write an oppression allegory with nonhuman races but there are also humans in it and you can’t have all your humans being white so then they have like a black person calling an elf a slur or something. Why this
Every time I have to sit through a blue person explaining racism to poc because somebody didn’t think very hard about their scifi/fantasy setting I just think to myself… why are they doing that
Somebody in the notes said “because there aren’t any writers of color behind the scenes” bingo! But it is also worth noting that it is possible to write characters who aren’t Just Like You if you know what you’re doing. Maybe talk to more kinds of people. Do more research on topics you’re unfamiliar with before you try to portray them etc
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